Michael; Brenda and I (back in the day) used to buy the $298 vacation packages at Vegas World and we got $500 of those promotional chips in our packages at the time of check-in. I used to play half of them on red, Brenda played the other half on black and we would cover the zeros with $10 each of our own money and we won enough on one spin and the free play $5 tokens to almost pay for the entire package, which included our room, 2 show tix for Martin and Rossi, plus free unlimited drinks for 4 days and 3 nights at any Vegas World casino lounge.

In addition to the vacation package ... out-of-state residents with ID could sign up for another promotion near the huge big 6 wheel, which entitled you to additional free play chips and tokens simply by checking in every 40 minutes over a 3 hour period to have your book stamped. That usually put us over the top to cover our total package expense.

After taking advantage of several VW vacation packages, we bought into the $1999 package that helped Bob Stupak begin construction on his Stratosphere Tower that gave us something like 7 trips to Vegas World (which had to be separated by six months between visits) with $1000 in match play chips each visit. Using the half on red, half on black, we were assured of getting back at least $3500 over the course of seven trips ... or so we thought ... until Stupak sold the place after we used 5 of the 7 promised trips. The new owner would not honor the match play chip package ... but they did honor the additional two stays there. All in all, we did pretty good ... and Stupak raised a lot of money through these promotions to begin construction on his tower without going to the bank to borrow money at double digit interest rates.

I recall one of our 7 trip pacakges that co-incided with a CC & GTCC Convention where we were given $1000 Vegas World $25 chips with black/white edge inserts in our package. I took dozens of them to the convention and sold them to Janice and Jerry O'Neal for $15 each, who sold them all during the show for full face value. That chip books pretty high in today's TCR.